Childhood obesity rates are rising sharply worldwide, creating urgent questions: does the public support government involvement? And do people see obesity as a structural or individual problem? These questions matter for the legitimacy and effectiveness of public policy. Research on comparative public attitudes remains limited. This study addresses that gap. We analyse representative survey data from forty Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, including 39,746 respondents. Childhood obesity carries serious consequences for health, education, employment and life expectancy. Parental choices shape children’s diets and activity levels, yet government involvement remains contested, balancing policy goals against personal freedom. At the structural level, a powerful food industry drives rising obesity rates. An experimental vignette design tests the causal effect of the level of risk to a child on public support for government involvement. We also examine links between support, trust and political values and how childhood obesity is framed. A clear majority supports government involvement, consistent with child rights regulations. The level of risk to a child causally increases support. Trust and preferences for values of care and order correlate positively with support. Most respondents frame obesity as a health issue. Few identify it as a structural issue; a finding with significant implications for policy effectiveness.

Ballot propositions provide a unique instance of direct democracy in which voters have a say in a state’s legislative process. However, voters vary in how they understand and evaluate these measures, many of which can be relatively complicated and comprised of multiple provisions. When multiple provisions exist within a single proposition, how do voters aggregate their potentially varying support across the provisions in their calculus of overall support for the proposition? Are all provisions weighted equally or do some matter more? To examine these questions, we construct novel survey questions on three real ballot measures under consideration during the 2022 midterm election cycle. By randomly assigning how we ask respondents for their support of a given ballot proposition, we garner insight into how voters approach voting on ballot measures and their greater decision-making process. We find evidence of a provision-based negativity bias, which is strongest on the most complex and least polarized issue.

Intelligent kindness has been proposed as a management model for reviving the UK welfare state and returning it to adequate functionality. Its goal, to deliver kindness as a core good, resembles that of the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), which sought to provide the compassion of hospice care across all end-of-life care, irrespective of setting. Analysis of the LCP’s eventual failure suggests intelligent kindness faces similar risks, which can be avoided. Distinguishing between providing and enabling kindness, managing the relationship between kindness, material and cognitive resources, having dedicated staff to champion it past the roll-out stage, concurrent research planning and implementation, and careful management of its scope and boundaries as it becomes more mainstream should protect it, and help it become established as part of UK welfare regulatory culture.

This article looks at the deregulation of US prison labor in the 1970s and 1980s, and the use of prison labor in information technology (IT) and digital electronics supply chains. The article, on one hand, locates the effort to deregulate prison labor in US electronics firms’ search for cheap labor enclaves and the uneven development of the postwar United States. At the same time, the article situiates this deregulatory turn in the progressive reforms of the 1970s. These reforms, which occurred first at the state and local levels, sought to promote prisoner welfare, provide opportunities for “self-help,” and rationalize the allocation of state and local resources in light of rising inflation. As such, the article complicates narratives of the rise of neoliberalism, which center issues like “lost confidence” in the efficacy of federal social welfare programs, breaches in public trust following Watergate, the 1973 oil shock, knock-on effects of New Deal and Great Society programs, or emerging “family values” and racist dog-whistle politics. It also frames the labor history of digital electronics in a way that supports an analysis of the relationship between capitalist development and US federalism aongside the particularities of firm-level motivation, insitutional inertia, and prevailing political ideology. Current discussions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and corrections largely focus on the use of incarcerated persons to train AI algorithms or the use of AI systems to surveil prisoners. However, this article centers the growth of tech supply chains in the 1970s and 1980s as an important precursor to the development of contemporary AI technology and firms.

This paper examines how senior executives at the UK’s largest publicly listed companies financially benefited from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), and seeks to explain this phenomenon with the concept of elite welfare. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we analyse the impact of participation in the CJRS on executive remuneration between 2019 and 2023. Drawing on a sample of Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 firms (n = 246), we find that receipt of furlough support in 2020 was associated with significant increases in chief executive officer (CEO) performance pay and total remuneration in the immediate post-pandemic year. We interpret these results through a new analytical approach that understands elite income derived from rent-extraction facilitated by public policy or expenditure as a form of welfare. Unlike conventional welfare, which typically comprises relatively modest payments and concessions to broad sections of the population, elite welfare accrues to a small minority in privileged positions, taking the form of extractions of rent arising through opportunities created by government policy. We argue that recognising elite welfare as a parallel welfare system – largely insulated from competitive constraint and market discipline – provides a valuable new perspective on the interdependencies between inequality, public policy and the redistributive logics of the modern state.

Voting in the United States involves two steps: registering to vote and then casting a ballot. At the same time, the US states differ greatly in what policies govern their registration and voting processes. However, election scholars lack comprehensive and comparable measures of the distinct costs of voter registration and ballot casting, limiting our understanding of the relative difficulty of each step of the voting process, their causes, and their consequences. To alleviate this issue, we decompose the Cost of Voting Index into measures of registration and ballot-casting costs, separately. In doing so, we (1) demonstrate the multidimensionality of the COVI, (2) create a four-category typology of state-level election access ecosystems, and (3) demonstrate the value of these measures through brief examinations of frequently studied research questions. By disentangling registration and ballot-casting policies, this approach distinguishes each policy arena, allowing scholars to examine key theoretical debates about where institutional barriers matter most. These scores can be applied to a variety of research questions, including voter turnout, citizen confidence in elections, and beyond.

For India to meet the sustainable development goals for disability inclusion, realizing disability justice through universal accessibility for persons with disabilities (PwDs) is essential. Universal access guarantees equitable access for PwDs and ensures their just inclusion in mainstream society. India’s National Sample Survey reveals that a significant number of Indian citizens harbour a disability, with a higher prevalence being reported among older adults, among males, and among people living in rural areas, showing that accessibility is as much a matter of justice as of provision. Poverty and disability are intricately connected, and there is evidence of these leading to vulnerability and exclusion from society and the labour force. The lack of reliable public data on accessibility to PwDs in India impairs inclusion, with some of the challenges being in defining disability and recognition of stigma and exclusions. Poor implementation of well-meaning policies and inappropriate budgetary spending further exacerbate this. Achieving universal accessibility demands more than legal affirmation; it requires strong political will, sustained financing, and administrative accountability. In the backdrop of the recent Supreme Court ruling on universal accessibility, this exploration discusses the importance of grassroots activism and public policy development that is inclusive and efficient with monitoring and evaluation systems in the policy design phase, such that efficiency and learning are imbibed throughout the development, implementation, and evaluation phases. For this to sustain, achieving accessibility must shift from a legal–technical exercise to a justice-oriented target grounded in the nation-building agenda, with sustained financing and continued grassroots activism.

Political knowledge is a key resource for democratic participation. But, it is unevenly distributed. White, male, affluent, and older citizens consistently demonstrate higher levels of policy knowledge. Membership in an issue public – a group with personal stakes in particular policies – may help narrow these gaps by fostering engagement among those most affected. Using a new, representative state survey of nearly 26,000 respondents, we examine knowledge of 10 salient state policies to assess whether issue-based engagement reduces entrenched inequalities. We find large knowledge disparities across class, race, gender, and age, mirroring broader political disparities. Issue public membership boosts issue-specific knowledge for some disadvantaged groups, especially LGBT individuals and women, but not uniformly. Advantaged members of issue publics, such as white or upper-class respondents, remain better informed than their less advantaged counterparts. These findings indicate that issue publics can mitigate, but not eliminate, policy knowledge disparities.

Does a politician’s religion influence their policymaking? While existing research has examined how gender, class, and ethnicity shape political decisions, the role of religiosity remains understudied. This paper investigates how religious values influence debt repayment decisions among local politicians. I develop a novel measure of individual religiosity, based on names matching local patron saints, and apply it to 62,908 candidates in Italian municipal elections. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that narrowly elected religious Catholic mayors are more likely to increase debt repayment. This effect likely reflects two mechanisms: Catholic moral teachings, which stress the obligation to repay debt, and risk aversion rooted in religion. Overall, these findings demonstrate that religion meaningfully shapes the fiscal behavior of elected officials.

This article examines the institutionalization of emergency preparedness in the United States, situating the Californian experience, particularly in Los Angeles, within this broader transformation from a fragmented federal concern into a decentralized form of governance. Although scholarship has addressed specific risk domains and institutional mechanisms, few studies have explored how civilian roles in preparedness were historically constructed. This research addresses that gap by analyzing how Cold War civil defense mandates were reinterpreted through civic, professional, and institutional networks in California. Adopting a sociohistorical approach, it draws on archival records, media discourse, institutional documents, and US legal sources. Findings reveal that the figure of the “prepared civilian” emerged through contingent adaptations rather than top-down design and that preparedness circulated unevenly across governance levels. The study contributes to public policy history by reframing emergency preparedness as a historically contingent mechanism of power, shaping institutional knowledge and practice within evolving emergency management systems.

In this field essay, we discuss the state of women and politics research in State Politics and Policy Quarterly from 2000 to 2025, and we consider directions for future research on women, gender, and state politics and policy. SPPQ has served as an outlet for research on intersectionality, gendered public policy, and women in state political institutions, although most foundational work on women and state politics has occurred outside of this flagship journal for state politics. We argue that work on women’s mass political behavior in the states, further and more thoughtful assessments concerning the relationship between sex and gender, and expansion of our approaches to intersectionality are key areas for expansion in the journal. We hope that more scholars of women and state politics will submit manuscripts to SPPQ in order to understand further gendered politics and policy in the states from multiple perspectives.